Category: Possible inventions

The medics currently define binge drinking as having more than a couple of pints of beer in one session. How quickly they seem to forget their own time as medical students -when by that definition, every evening would have been a veritable ‘bender’.

Overconsumption is a serious problem though and so today’s invention is a way to help limit the damage which people do to themselves via alcohol.

Someone entering a bar would be equipped with a glass for the night. The barstaff would stick a tamper-evident label on the base. Every hour, the colour of the stickers on clean glasses would be changed. In the same way that access to swimming baths is managed, people with a certain colour label could only buy a drink when their glass was empty and their colour was declared active. The frequency of colour changing would be managed to achieve a balance between happy customers and sensible behaviour.

This approach would limit everyone’s rate of drinking to a safer level and also avoid synchronous stampedes to the bar.

Fast food restaurants aren’t designed to provide a calm, restful environment. Their business model relies on feeding people quickly and then having them leave, making space for more paying customers (despite the implications for their digestion).

This is in direct opposition to the traditional restaurant approach of encouraging patrons to get comfortable, relax and spend a long time eating exotic desserts and drinking successive rounds of highly-priced beverages.

There are limited ways in which a fast food place can encourage people to eat and go -without being openly rude. The music can be high-paced and the portions small -or at least easy to eat.

Today’s invention is intended as a subtle support for such speed dining. It consists of a large patch of white light projected upwards within the eating area. This would be programmed to move across the walls and over the ceiling. The speed of movement would be imperceptibly low, but still much faster than that of the sun across the sky. This would give diners the impression of time passing rapidly, but without their being aware of why.

Faffing over the french fries would thus definitely be curtailed.

I’m on a personal crusade against paper. Especially the kind that ends up in dusty, ill-sorted backroom cabinets full of broken slings containing illegible historical notes of undetermined importance.

Today’s invention is therefore simply to incorporate a scanner into every laptop. Their geometries are pleasingly similar: I imagine making a machine with a modified screen which also contains a scanning head and lights. drop your paper document on the keyboard, face-up, close the laptop lid and press ‘scan’.

Now that reasonable quality scanning is available at ridiculously low cost and in suprisingly lightweight packages, I can foresee that everything which now exists in a paper form will soon find itself directly pdf’d by these devices.

There are lots of people who find dealing with cutting up their dinner very hard work. This may be because of difficulties in coordination or a lack of limb or hand strength -or some visual impairment.

Today’s invention is a way to arrange for every meal to be neatly and hygienically presliced, enabling a diner to eat bitesized pieces -using a spoon if necessary.

A microwave oven can be equipped with a small laser cutter ($50 is the cost of a homemade one). This would be set up to scan a plate of food and cut it into small, square pieces, without contaminating the meal or cutting the plate and whilst maintaining the overall shape of the food itself.

Slicing patterns other than square grids could be employed, if a more visually appealing arrangement were required.

I hate flying. No, in fact, it’s airlines I have a problem with. I find it difficult to place the lives of my family in the hands of organisations which can’t guarantee that even our bags will get delivered on time and intact -or which choose to fly through rough air to save on fuel.

Today’s invention is a simple heartbeat monitor which airline passengers would be required to wear on their wrist. This would plug into the audio jack in all passenger seats and provide data about when in a flight heartbeats rose rapidly. This would be correlated with the control movements stored in the flight recorder and these, in turn, would provide a measure of the smoothness with which each pilot was doing his/her job.

This would have to take into account the showing of any particularly emotional inflight movies, but such events are deliberately pretty rare in my experience. In addition, anyone about to experience a heart attack or undertake some act of violence would be detectable via their change in pulse, in time for crew members to do something about the situation.

Almost all humans enjoy, even need, an occasional hug.

Today’s invention is a vest which can record a temporal distribution of pressure across its surface, when a wearer is hugged, and then reproduce it later. Such a design might best be built using a form of durable bubble wrap. Each ‘bubble’ could be fitted with a pressure sensor and an independent air feed.

A microcomputer would record the variation in pressure experienced in each cell during the embrace of a particular loved one. This could then be reproduced by raising and lowering the pressure in each bubble to recreate at least the physical sensations of the hugging effect.

The characteristic hugs of several different loved ones could be separately recorded and played back in order to provide appropriate inspiration or reassurance during that tough day at work or during times of emotional turmoil.

I understand that there’s a certain desert-dwelling beetle that can collect water from the atmosphere on foggy days just by opening its wings. Which brings me to the subject of airline toilets. Northwest, like all airlines, are getting obsessive about shedding excess weight, especially water, from their planes. Every 25 pounds they remove, saves $440,000 a year, due to the cost of fuel, they say.

Today’s invention is a system to collect water vapour as it impacts and condenses on the leading edges of airliner wings. Arrays of pores in these edges, backed by absorptive foam, would allow water to be caught and pumped away into the fuselage without increasing the drag (and fuel bills). This water would only be captured and used on-demand by the aircraft lavatories, greatly reducing the total amount of liquid carried on board.

This would also lessen any additional global warming associated with jets dumping water carried up in their tanks. It might also have the effect of warming the wings slightly, reducing the tendency for them to ice-up.

I’m advised by some females of my acquaintance that handbags must match their clothing ensemble. This means that the essentials of life that they cart around must all be transferred from bag to bag according to their couture du jour. (This colour matching is a problem I never have, since I tend to dress as far possible in uniform navy blue).

Today’s invention is an inner handbag (purse, if you are American) which allows these myriad secret contents to be conveniently transferred from bag to bag as a unit.

The inner bag would need to be constructed as a bunch of zip-linked, transparent pouches, so that the various nonstandard handbag geometries could be dealt with.

Each of these pouches might have a different-coloured, glow-in-the-dark neck in order to minimise the access time for keys, phone, emergency chocolate etc. Actually, an integral light, activated by opening the outer bag would provide an obvious benefit.

Brushing one’s teeth effectively has all sorts of health benefits. Technique counts for a lot, though, and today’s invention attempts to encourage good practice.

It takes the form of an electric toothbrush, consisting of two conventional heads but mounted in the scissor arrangement shown. A reel of dental tape in the handle runs from the centre of one brush to the other (and is collected on another disposable reel).

The scissors are lightly sprung in the open position. The tape is moved along the surface of one’s teeth until it finds a gap into which it is then pushed. The ‘scissors’ are squeezed closed and brushing of the teeth and gums occurs on both sides at the same time, in a mostly gum-to-teeth direction, whilst flossing also takes place.

Each brush head would be slightly wider than normal so that brushing, centred on the inter-tooth gap, would simultaneously clean more than half the width of the teeth on either side (the floss between one’s teeth would limit the side-to-side rasping, which I seem to do unconsciously, as well as making it uncomfortable to scrub in the tooth-to-gum direction).